From brian@garage.co.jp  Sun Feb 20 08:56:06 2000
From: brian@garage.co.jp (Brian Takashi Hooper)
Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 17:56:06 +0900
Subject: [Mailman-i18n] I18N Japanese issues
Message-ID: <38AFAC261AE.0188BRIAN@smtp.garage.co.jp>

Hi there I18N people, I'm Brian Hooper, this is my first post to
Mailman-I18N.  I'm doing my best to try to make Mailman work better for
my environment, which is Japanese.

Juan Carlos was kind enough to send me a copy of the I18N-patched
Mailman that he has made, so I have been looking over it with an eye to
whatever improvements I could make to have it work well with asian
languages.  The diff was pretty big (all those _(" ")s!), so I might
have missed it, but one thing that I was looking for that still (for my
environment, at least) needs to be done is support for RFC 1342-style
encoded headers, that is, things that look like:

Subject: =?ISO-2022-JP?B?GyRCJTMlcyVGJXMlRCROMHo3USQuGyhC?=

I have made a simple converter and will add it to Mailman so that it
converts these things to the local encoding set as appropriate for mail
messages and the archives.

Message bodies have similar issues, I think - typically Japanese
messages are converted to JIS and then Base 64 encoded; although other
formats are supported this seems to be the friendliest one for the
greatest variety of mail gateways and clients.

In Japan there is also the issue of dealing with multiple encodings for
the Web and mail - the Web is standardized on SJIS or EUC, whereas mail
messages use ISO-2022-JP, JIS.  So I think the right way to do this
would allow you to set, perhaps in mm_cfg or perhaps in the program
logic switched on LC_*, which encoding you want for Web output and which
encoding to use for mail, and also allow the specification of a custom
codec(s) to do the necessary conversions (I think with Japanese we can
get away with EUC <-> JIS, most other languages wouldn't even need
anything special).

What does everyone think?  Opinions, comments (esp. if there are others
interested in specifically asian-language or RFC 1341/1342 handling).

--Brian Hooper
Tokyo, Japan